Jack Black and VH1 have created some fun, but not entirely safe for school (NSFS) how to videos for their new show Acceptable.tv. Check them out here http://acceptable.tv/tutorials – with a little editing, they might be usable in the classroom. But they are fun.

As a teacher of high school journalists, I wonder, just what are we preparing these kids for anyway? I’ve been a teacher of journalism for 12 years, and I worked at a PBS station on a college campus for 2 1/2 years before that. So, for nearly 15 years I’ve been preparing kids to become journalists or work in the media. In the last 3 years I’ve had a lot of success, several of my students have gone on to college to pursue careers in RTV-Film, Communications and Journalism.

I try to encourage them, and I haven’t got the heart to tell them that I wonder if journalists will even exist in 20 years. The technology that has set journalism free may also be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The internet, which has made it easier than ever to be a journalist and get your message to the audience, is also killing journalism.

If you haven’t been paying attention, newspapers are dying. Ad revenue is down, news web site revenue is flat, classified are on Craig’s list, used cars are sold at autobytel.com, even obits are online now. TV is starting to feel the pinch too. Just as we see more and more channels, we are also seeing a splintering of the audience. The net and TiVo are killing commercials and viewership is down overall. The news is being hit the hardest. Why watch the news when you can get it all on the net? College’s are closing their yearbooks. Independent photographers are having trouble selling photos.

I’m sure a few daily papers will survive USA Today, NY Times, Wall Street Journal. CNN and Fox News will make it too. But what about local or regional news?

It’s not all bad news – Google and Yahoo are starting small news staffs, newspapers are hiring VJ (video journalists), college newspaper ads sales are strong, and most of the skills our students learn in high school journalism translate really well to the web.

But how much longer will what we do be called journalism? Already at my school, I will be teaching 7 classes next year 3 journalism and 3 instructional technology and one that is half of each. I predict that within five years, I’ll be teaching almost no classes that fall under journalism. Yearbook/Newspaper will become Desktop Publishing, Broadcast Journalism will become Video Technology, Photojournalism and Journalism will stop and Web Design and Intro to Mass Media will replace them.

The skills are nearly the same, so the learning curve for me as a teacher is very small. But the output is different. Journalism has a higher calling that is founded in the First Amendment. Journalists have a calling to shine a light on corruption, greed, crime and to hold up our community and nation to a higher standard. The new media does this, but only when they feel like it. Sometimes it goes unwatched, unspoken, unwritten. While the new media has the ability to be almost everywhere, it does not have the deep pockets to do real investigative journalism.

The new IT classes I will be teaching seem to have PR at their heart more than journalism. I’ve always felt that most state and local governments would much rather see high school and even college newspapers go away. They’d rather have a PR instrument like a yearbook, a “GMA” style TV magazine show, or a great web site for the school, etc. Reporting, editorials and unpleasant facts they can do without. For many, the death of real journalism will be seen as a good thing – a barking dog they can do without. For others, they will barely notice it’s passing an ever growing number of schools have lost their newspapers or yearbooks already.

I will continue to try to do my best to prepare my students as journalists. But I fear that the days of journalism are passing right before our eyes. The unfortunate fact is that freedom of the press means that the public can ignore real news in favor of infotainment, “reality TV” and pop culture. A free press is no guarantee of an interested or educated public.

Want to refresh your batteries this summer – go rent some DVDs. I personally like Blockbuster online, but Netflix works good too. Just click and they show up in the mailbox. Here’s some great movies to get excited about journalism again this summer:

1. Shattered Glass – This is probably one of the best journalism movies ever made. It focuses on ethics and how easy it is to ignore the faults in the popular kid in the newsroom as he makes news out of whole cloth. Based on the true story of Stephen Glass at the New Republic. PG-13

2. Good Night and Good Luck – Second best journalism movie ever made. It is of course the story of Edward R. Murrow and his fight against McCarthyism. And he even smokes on air – a sin under the new MPAA rules. PG

3. The Pelican Brief – Denzel Washington plays a great newspaper reporter. I like to use just the part where he interviews her and reviews his notes with my students. It is a great way to show kids how to take good notes. Based on the John Grisham novel. PG-13

4. The Killing Fields – Another great true story of a photographer Dith Pran and a reporter during the fall of Laos and the aftermath. R

5. All The President’s Men- I guess you just can’t escape this movie, the grand-daddy of all journalism movies. If you don’t know about Watergate, then you might want to check out a history book first. PG

6. State of Play – Really good movie about the modern world of journalism. It’s all in here, the salty old dog reporter and the young pup with a blog, layoffs, technology, politicians, a scandal, a corporate boss and good old fashioned beat reporting. PG-13

7. Absence of Malice – Another good story about ethics and when you should print information that might be damaging. This is one of the few fictional ones on the list. PG

8. The Truman Show – Not really about journalism, but about our television culture and how much we are invading into people’s personal space and the Orwellian camera culture we all live in today. PG-13

9. The Devil Wears Prada – Pretty good movie based on the book of the same name about the difficulties of breaking in and working at a fashion magazine. The movie is now an obit for a dying industry. PG13

10. Broadcast News – Pretty good movie on what is fake in the news. Some good scenes you could actually use to show kids how a news interview is really done and how looks are sometimes more important than talent. R

My school has both the slowest T-1 connection ever known and a cranky IT director who refuses to unblock useful sites because they don’t want any streaming video to slow down our already slow servers.

So that means if I want to use a video clip from the internet at school, I have to download it at home, save it on a disk and bring it to school. This is perfectly within our rights as educators under fair use to show video, especially short clips as part of the educational process. Plus many podcast creators made their show so that people could use it to learn – and they don’t expect to get anything back for it. Just be careful – don’t download commercial products from bitTorrent sites.

OK, but I can’t get this thing to play on my computer. There are a bunch of file formats on the net, the most common are .wmv .mov .flv .dv

Most of these can be played by downloading free players like Windows Media Player and Quicktime. Both are available on Mac and Windows. But FLV files are a little bit different. They are only playable with a FLV player or a converter. And they are harder to download, since you can’t just right click on the file and save it.

Here’s a great resource for photography teachers, Photoshop Wednesday – a video podcast by John Chambers, a great Photoshop teacher. The lessons are in Photoshop CS, but I know they translate well into PS 7.0 and CS2 as well. Each lesson covers one of the main Photoshop tools. You can download it here:

Seth is an advertising guru who understands that the world has changed from media driven products to user driven ones. His TED Talk is one of the better ones, but there are lots of gems there. The TED talk site is http://www.ted.com/talks or you can download them at Apple’s iTunes site. Go to the podcast links or just search for TED Talks. I’ve attached my PPT file that I’m going to share with my students this fall. I hope we can embrace this philosophy of change for our yearbook and turn it into a vehicle for student centered content. Stop Selling To The Center

All journalists should be good writers and the best way to become a better writer is to be a better reader. Every journalism classroom should have six to ten decent magazines available for students (and the teacher) to read. Here’s a few that I suggest:

1. Wired – Almost all media is high tech today and Wired is on the ragged edge of tech. They do a great job of keeping you informed of the up and coming tech trends before they get here. They also have very cool design and well written stories and interviews.

2. CJR – Columbia Journalism Review. How can you call yourself a journalist if you don’t read CJR? They have a great piece in this month’s issue on the Military Times and another one about the British Press and how it is different from the American Press.

3. Print – A really great design magazine that is just full of ideas for all kinds of things like use of text and color.

4. Shutterbug – Picking a photography magazine is hard because you want one that does not show nudity. Shutterbug is more focused on the serious amateur photographer and their needs. There are reviews of new cameras and equipment, technique articles and web resources.

5. Entertainment Weekly – Just a great magazine about pop culture that has fun headlines, good layout and well written articles. Usually stays away from the more gossipy stuff.

6. MacLife (used to be MacAddict) – If you use computers, you should read a computer magazine. If you don’t use Macs (you should – joke) then get a decent PC magazine.

7. US News & World Report – It is getting really hard to find a respectable weekly news magazine since so many of them have been part of journalistic scandals lately. I used to take Newsweek until they fabricated a story. As a teacher, you really want the most reliable news magazine you can find.

8. C:JET – Communications: Journalism Education Today. Join JEA (www.jea.org) and you will get it for free! Great magazine, although it tends to focus mainly on print and photography.

9. In house publications: Taylor Talk, Josten’s Adviser & Staff, the UIL Leaguer (Texas), The Quill, etc. Whatever company you use to print your yearbook has a publication, your state journalism organization probably does too, so does Quill & Scroll. Read them, they have great ideas.

10. Finally, the local paper. If you teach newspaper or an introduction to journalism class, this is a must. But it is also useful for almost any journalism class you teach. My wife is an English teacher and she finished up the year with her freshmen with a 2-week mini lesson on newspapers. The kids liked it and thought it was an interesting change from literature and prepping for the TAKS test and the AP test.